


Embers

by CourierNew



Category: Unsounded
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-22 16:54:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8293126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CourierNew/pseuds/CourierNew
Summary: The river is blocked. The travelers rest.Submission for the 2016 Unsounded fanfiction contest.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Time has laid its hands upon me  
> Cold as a fire of ashy coal  
> But where, oh, where is the Spanish lady  
> Neat and sweet about the soul?  
> \- "Spanish Lady"

The River Jarla was a capricious thing, and given to deception. It parted the land of Kasslyne thin and straight as an open wound, but those who ferried it were known to tell tales of how the water’s surface couldn’t seem to make up its mind, how it shone mirror-still one moment and roared like a curse in the next, and how the currents deep below knotted and snapped like a nest of eels. Even some of its more placid stretches held a riptide that would snatch at a hapless swimmer’s leg and drag them into the deep. And what the River Jarla seized, it was hesitant to let go. That could be easily divined from the strata of detritus on its bed. Broken boats, bleached bones, young trees pulled off the riverbank by some passing storm. Flashes of precious metal choked with silt and verdigris. Dropped cargo of all kinds – rotted food and rusted swords and blank-eyed sculpture staring out blindly at passing fish.

They had navigated these drifts as best they could since they’d fled the smoldering ruins of Ethelmik. Uaid wasn’t exactly nimble at the best of times, but he’d been able to hobble around the larger piles of jetsam and casually sweep aside the rest. At least until the end of the second day’s travel, when the river had deepened to the point where the sunlight overhead was a rusty insinuation on the water’s surface and the current whipped around Uaid’s shell fierce enough to make even Duane’s half-decayed ears ring. There was a solid dam of garbage here, too unstable to climb over, interlocking tree branches and sharp-edged shards of masonry. No chance of surfacing and walking around it, not on Uaid’s damaged leg. Some of it looked a bit like the architecture they’d left behind. Quigley had cursed and claimed that Ethelmik’s ruins had run ahead of them, gathered here to harass them yet again.

Now Quigley was topside, sitting on the riverbank, staring down at water that had turned dark as ink in the fading sun. The surface bubbled and gnashed as Uaid slowly cleared the blockage, one handful at a time. It may have been faster to just apply some liquid aspect to the trash and turn it soft and pliable to be dislodged by the current, but Uaid was Quigley’s construct and this was his voyage and he was adamant that it be cleared by hand. He had practical reasons for eschewing pymary – it would have been treacherously difficult to aim from within Uaid’s shell or from the riverbank; he was concerned that anyone seeing half-liquefied statuary bobbing downstream may be impelled to share this story with the authorities; the crackling of the khert could alert some Crescian wage-wright that, considering his luck, would no doubt be passing mere yards away – but mostly he knew that Adelier would offer to help, and that was more than he could take right now. The prattling corpse and his sticky-fingered mutant mascot had both been mercifully well-behaved so far, but Adelier’s reek of sanctimony still nauseated Quigley almost as much as the dry spice of rot, and he was eager for a chance to get out into the open air. Even if it was a risk.

He’d taken precautions. The water’s opacity had been greatly increased, hiding Uaid’s labor, and his hair was glamoured an unexciting brown, because a Plat’s garish mop stood out like a beacon at this time of the evening. This stretch of the river was flanked by deep woods and empty meadows, but still, he knew it was always important to remain discreet. Any reasonable traveling companions of his would do the same.

And that’s why he wasn’t at all surprised when his son and Jivi began gormlessly poking around the river’s edge, while Adelier and Frummagem started a Twins-forsaken fire in the woods. He looked behind him and narrowed his eyes at the warm, inviting, highly visible glow between those trees. He would have dearly _enjoyed_ reasonable traveling companions, but he’d never had much luck with company, and now he’d been reduced to a sullen-eyed Crescian stray, a rodentine cutpurse and a dead man with a death wish. The fact that this was actually a step up for him was little comfort.

The water heaved as Uaid threw something loose; it looked to be the better part of a sailboat, its stern breaking the surface like a waving hand before sinking once again.

“Settle down, for pity’s sake,” he muttered. “I can’t have Matty instructing you all the time.”

They’d always hidden behind pymary, bloody unreliable though it could be. Glamours to hide their hair, to hide Uaid’s footsteps, to hide the invisible stink of a couple of vagrant traitor Plats in unfamiliar land. Back in Alderode, he’d once heard a story about a certain wright, name and caste long forgotten, whose grasp of the khert was so absolute that he could wrest aspects from _abstracts_ – weighing something down with a leaden tone of voice or lighting up a room with the twinkle in a child’s eye. When he’d tired of his country, he’d cloaked himself in invisibility stolen from the _kussen_ , the shorn slave caste – those wretched, forgotten things – and crossed the border, right under the eyes of the stingers, to be lost forever to history. Nonsense, of course, and dangerous nonsense at that, but when he’d mentioned the story to Vienne she had sat him down and forced him to tell it in full. Her eyes had sparkled like ingots.

The water murmured beneath Quigley’s dangling boots. He clenched his clasped hands until his knuckles cracked.

No wonder she had been so enraptured by the tale. She’d always been obsessed with changing the shapes of things, plucking out this bit, transplanting it here, altering them surely as any wright. And then, of course, she’d overreached herself. She’d tried to change the shape of the world itself – that inextricable order that kept the strong on top and the weak below. And the world had seen her labor, and laughed, and then reached out and broken her in two.

There was a lesson in that. The dangers of ambition. Admittedly not a lesson that Quigley had learned very well, his recent travails with that corpulent whoreson Starfish were proof of that, but he’d learn to be a quicker study in the future. Keep your head low. Your gains modest. And whenever possible, exercise prudence, caution, and constant, constant vigilance.

“Papa?”

Quigley yelped in surprise and snapped his head around and Matty, who’d suddenly materialized beside him, yelped back and flinched, fierce enough for his hat to fall over his eyes. He struggled to lift it back up as Quigley got his heartbeat under control.

“Sorry!” Matty cried. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to-”

“No, it’s fine. Keep your voice down.” He cleared his throat, attempted to regain some dignity. “What do you want?”

“I just wanted to see how Uaid was doing. Is he almost finished?”

“He has the better part of a village quarter to clear by the look of it. We may be stranded here for…wait, hold still.” He reached out and straightened Matty’s hat again. It was a miracle that the flimsy thing had survived the past several days, but his son had been wise enough to keep it stashed within Uaid after their little employment dispute on Ethelmik’s docks. Quigley was quietly grateful for it; if Matty kept his hair under the cap and the brim pulled low over his useless eyes, it helped him hide better than any number of glamours.

“There. Stand up straight. As I was saying, we’ll be here a while yet. See for yourself, if you want. Chitz can probably get a clearer view than any of us.”

Matty gingerly stepped over the riverbank and angled the stuffed doll downward, its purple button eyes peering through the glamour and the dark currents below. Matty, meanwhile, stared off at some vague point on the horizon. Quigley was always slightly unnerved by that toy ever since the Black Tongues had lashed its vision to Matty’s own – it was good that he could still see in any capacity, true, but Quigley was never quite sure whose eyes to meet when talking to him.

“He looks happy,” was Matty’s verdict.

“He so often does. We’ll be leaving well before daybreak in any case. Be ready.”

“Okay.”

Distant birdcalls marked off the silence between them. Downstream, the horizon tinged purple. The skies opposite were the color of flame, as though, off in the distance, Ethelmik was still burning. It could be days yet before the town’s ashes cooled, the bones of its inhabitants scraped from the ruin.

“It’s a nice night,” Matty volunteered.

“Yes,” said Quigley.

“Quiet. Not too cold.”

“Mhm.”

“Papa, are you okay?” The question sounded hesitant.

“As much as can be expected, given the circumstances.” He paused. “If I’d taken us to Sharteshane we could be enjoying more nights like this.”

No answer from his son. Quigley stared at his reflection in the water. Matty would not sit down beside him.

“I imagine you still wish we’d gone.”

“I. Um.” He reached up and cupped Chitz in one palm. “I’m not sure anymore. I mean, you helped Mr. Adelier and Captain Toma with that silver monster, right? If we hadn’t been there, things might have been worse. I’m just glad we were able to help people.” He seemed to sink into himself. “At least, you did. I just got in the way.”

“Yes. You made sandwiches. Then you set Uaid on the Peaceguard, cost me my payday, and nearly got all of us killed. That was your contribution to this whole endeavor.” Matty sagged further. “But. If you hadn’t done that, the two of us may well have been right there in the Nevergreen, enjoying Stockyard’s hospitality when that silver abomination went critical. Oblivious and unprepared. How would we have fared then, I wonder.”

Matty blinked and looked up. Quigley didn’t meet his gaze; he kept staring out at the opposite riverbank. The sunset struck his glasses and printed two hard circles of light over his eyes.

He said, “Your father is growing old, Matty.”

“That’s not true! You still have five more-”

“Old,” he repeated. “Old and simple. I claim to know the best path forward and just stumble into one pit of vipers after another. And I have precious little time left in which to correct my course.” Quigley sighed, steepled his fingers. “Unlike some of our present company, I’m still not fool enough to believe myself some crusader for good. As far as I’m concerned, pressing further into Cresce is suicidal and won’t earn us a single bronze to boot. But…my judgement has been unreliable, these days. Right now I’m just interested in repairing Uaid.” He regarded Matty out the corner of his eye. “After that, perhaps you should be the one to choose our destination.”

After several seconds of silence, he turned fully towards Matty. The boy had gone quite rigid; he seemed to have forgotten how to blink.

Quigley said, “Well?”

Matty opened and closed his mouth several times. Finally, he said, “Can I go play with Jivi?”

Quigley raised an eyebrow. He craned his head and looked downriver, where the Crescian boy was idly skipping stones across his water. He disliked Flask, but it was the low-level throb of dislike he harbored for absolutely everyone, which meant he was probably trustworthy enough.

“Fine,” he said. “But the both of you keep it down. And keep a sharp eye out anything upriver. You see even a hint of movement, you run back into those woods and stay hidden.  Understand?”

Matty nodded vigorously enough to dislodge a lock of white hair from under his hat. Quigley sighed again, and reached out to tuck it back in, and that was when his son threw his arms around his neck and squeezed tight. One immensely awkward moment later, he released him, and ran off without another word. Quigley watched him go, hands frozen in place.

He couldn’t say for certain if he loved the boy. There were too many bad memories around the emotion, obscuring it like silt. But he and Uaid were all that was left of Vienne after Alderode folded around her and swallowed her up – the last sparks out of her forge, so to speak. And all around was nothing but howling wind and driving rain, trying to douse them both. He had precious little else to do with his life besides shield those lights as best he could.

Jivi looked to be teaching Matty how to skip stones, himself. Matty wasn’t doing very well, but he made a game attempt.

“Fine,” Quigley said. “Let’s all be a little foolish tonight.”

With a grunt, he stood up, and waved a hand while muttering beneath his breath. The khert-lines shivered and the River Jarla turned transparent as glass, so that he could clearly see Uaid’s labors below. The construct thrust his hands deep into the mass of refuse, pulling out larger chunks and leaving the rest to float free like unstopping a drain. Quigley glimpsed his face through the twisting clouds of mud; it was the wide, empty smile he usually wore when nothing was in mortal peril.

Aspect from abstract, he thought. Fine, then. Take this “gift from the gods,” this insultingly transient life, and give it to the insects where it belonged. Take this tedious, numbing grief and weave it into a stone. Take the unending petty cruelty of this world and cast it ten thousand miles away to boil the black and unsounded sea. Make it nothing. Make it gone.

Vienne could have done it. With hammer and tongs she’d beaten their lives into a shape so sturdy that he couldn’t seem to break them entirely, no matter how much he blundered. But he felt adrift now, more than ever, and so he stared down into the River Jarla. As if, in the traceries of river-silt, he would see his wife’s outline take form, and point the best way forward.

*             *             *

Duane used to enjoy the dusk. In the _ghers_ , this was the time of lamp-lighting and cries for suppertime from warm doorways, when the first pinpricks of stars showed through the veil of smoke overhead. Now there were no lamps, and no supper he’d ever be able to smell. He had to endure the growing turgidity of his thoughts as they fled him by night to leave only a drooling, hungering husk. But there were still stars, and he gazed up at them now as he gave his shackles a tug. The chain held strong. Small mercies.

He had half-expected pursuit when they left Ethelmik, but the Crescian military had apparently reveled in their butchery and gone home by a different route. Amidst all the smoke and blood, the passing of a few stray wrights and children had gone unnoticed, and now that they were more than a day’s travel from the town, he had cause to breathe easy, at least for the time being. The inherent madness of their endeavor masked their trail; few would expect refugees from a Crescian purge to turn ‘round and head even deeper into that blighted country. So he’d lit the fire against the growing night, for the sake of the children’s shivering bones if not his own, and shrugged off Quigley’s complaints.

Twilight tightened its noose around the campsite. The firelight teased at the pool of shadow that lay beneath his hood. And then he saw movement in the darkness at the campsite’s periphery. Footsteps that expertly avoided each rustling leaf. And now, the glimmer of a blade.

“Sette,” he said. “If you attempt to pluck out my eyes again it will go very badly for you.”

The figure stiffened. “I weren’t!”

“You weren’t?” He looked up and saw she’d made no attempt to hide the knife. “You weren’t. What, then?”

“Wanted t’see if you’d gone zombie yet.” She stepped fully into the light, her wild mane of hair stickier and smellier than usual – the close quarters inside Quigley’s construct hadn’t been kind to her. “Had to approach cautious-like. You get bitey.”

“Nothing to fear. I am bound.” He held up his shackled hands. “And I am yet capable of speech.”

“That could be anything. Zombie tricks. Escapin’ gases.”

_“Sette.”_

“Bah, fine.” She sniffed and tucked the knife back into her shirt. It wasn’t the notched cinquedea she’d wielded in Ethelmik’s dying hours – this one was shorter, smaller, its blade thin as a whisper. Duane had given up wondering where she found them all. The girl could empty a locked cutlery drawer with a sideways glance.

She sauntered over to the fire and plopped down cross-legged across from him, tail twitching behind her. Those green eyes seemed bigger and brighter than ever, but Duane knew that was only because of the changes in her expression. That cagey, narrow-lidded look had drained away somewhat since leaving Ethelmik, and she’d been almost worryingly well-behaved. He’d suspected further conspiracy from her, for a time, but when none came decided that she’d simply had her share of horror for the week without adding to it further. And so he’d allowed Sette her space.

“You’re usually half-gone this time a’ day,” she said suddenly.

“Yes. After our sordid encounter with that sinister silver, I do feel a bit more lucid than usual in the late hours. But the khert beckons, nonetheless.”

“I’ll keep an eye on that wanker after you nod off. Got to make sure he don’t try nothin’ untoward when you’re dribblin’ down your togs.”

“You mean Quigley?”

“Who else?” Her voice turned singsong. “The Plat prat and his Plat brat. I can tell he wants to crash you so bad it’s foggin’ up those glasses a’ his. Already tried it once! And he don’t play fair! Which I respect an’ all, but still.”

He smirked. “And if he were indeed to ‘crash’ me, I suppose you’d be utterly disconsolate.”

“Don’t make jokes!” Her eyes flashed. “You’re still me bodyguard, and that makes me your employer, and that means if anyone does you in I gots to spend me every wakin’ hour exactin’ a bloody vengeance against all responsible parties plus next a’ kin and family pets, too. And I ain’t got that kind of time.”

This from the girl who, not a fortnight ago, had happily offered his position to a senet beast after it had devoured him whole. But he held his tongue.

Sette looked down again, then shivered and huddled a bit closer to the fire. In the collar of her shirt, Boo poked out his slender arachnid’s head, as if scenting the air.

“Colder’n a statue’s snatch out here,” she said.

“Language. But yes, the seasons have turned a tad since we left Tawhoque. And there is nothing quite as bracing as a stiff breeze off running water. At least,” he added, “that is how I remember it. Cold and warmth alike are now quite beyond this tattered sackcloth of a skin.”

“Whine, whine, whine. Look at it this way, those other three are prob’ly freezin’ their nadgers off and you ain’t got that problem on account a’ how yours already turned all squishy an’ grey an’ tumbled down your trouser leg.”

“The imagery your mind conjures could _torment_ a man.”

“And besides,” she went on, “you seem awful interested in that fire for someone what can’t feel it.”

“Ssael had quite a bit to write on the subject of fire.” He smiled as Sette cringed in anticipation of the lecture. “For what greater symbol of man exists than the flame? The Twins would have had us all at their mercies, in the shadows, with only their honeyed lies to guide us into perdition. But in defiance of their wicked designs, man took up flame, and through his endeavor cultivated it from humble light to roaring blaze, until Sonum Ssael himself raised a torch and banished those false gods from the world forevermore.”

“Duane,” Sette groaned, “I’m gonna start chargin’ you five bronze for every time you god-bother at me.”

But Duane kept speaking nonetheless, his words turning slower and sludgy as the night crawled over his mind. But he remained articulate, taking comfort in his catechism.

“From fire to fire we mark our time. Each night we light yet another lamp. The embers of our lives stretch to the horizon, and as they endure, the darkness choking this world must also loosen its grip. Look not upon the doused flames of yesterday. Like the corpses of the false gods, those cold coals will offer you no solace. Instead we must take tinder in hand and move on to the next day, and then the next, until our own bodies became tinder for the pyres, and our souls are set free, to one day join Ssael beyond the Silver Wood.”

He fell silent. The firewood crackled, for a time.

Sette said, “There ain’t nothing in all the world your heathen gibberish can’t turn boring. What about pie? Your stoopid god got anything to say about pie?”

“The teachings of Ssael are reticent on the subject of pie.” She stared. “That means no.”

“See? Bloody useless religion.”

“Whereas I’m sure the Gefendur are bursting with knowledge about the subject,” he sighed.

“How d’you think Yerta got so fat?” That earned a snort from him, and she grinned back. “See, now y’got me speakin’ sacrilege.”

Then her face turned solemn again, and she bent low, hair falling over her eyes. Her bare toes carved abstract runes in the hard dirt.

“Been a while since we jawed like this,” she said quietly. “Seems like ever since we got to Ethelmik I couldn’t hear meself think for all the screamin’.” Her voice became lower still. “I still hear it, now n’ again. ‘s bothersome.”

“It fades,” said Duane. “With time.”

She gave no answer. The air was heavy with woodsmoke and things left unsaid. It was only when Boo clambered out of Sette’s shirt, settled on her shoulder, and lightly scratched her cheek with one thin leg that she broke out of her reverie.

“Well.” She sprang to her feet. “I got no inclination to stick around an’ watch your brains fall out. You stay here bein’ pensive and broodsome. Me an’ Boo are gonna nick Matty’s trousers an’ ransom ‘em to his da.”

“Do not overtax Quigley’s patience. If he sets your tail aflame, I shan’t help you.”

She stuck her tongue out at him and retreated into the dark. It was only when the dry crackle of her footsteps faded away that Duane realized that, for the whole conversation, she had not mentioned her father once.

All too often, and especially this late at night, when the line between his present days and his decaying past started to run and drip like tallow, he would confuse Sette with Mikaila – it was the eyes, that same faultless, venomous green. But that, too, had changed; he’d learned too much about Sette to repeat the mistake. Now when he looked at her, he first thought of their encounter in the tunnels of Ethelmik, after the flood had borne away that shrieking mass of flesh and silver. How she’d staggered at him with blade in hand, bleeding and pale, her father’s manipulations come to light, every mask slipped away. She’d looked unmoored from herself. Possibly she still was. If she needed to cling to a worm-eaten piece of driftwood like him to stay afloat, then so be it.

His mind grew dim. Soon he would find himself in the khert again, that kaleidoscopic catacomb of memory, awake and aware and searching for answers to questions that hadn’t yet been asked. Where Mikaila’s memories rested somewhere, and would have to go on resting, unfound and unacknowledged. Meanwhile his body would be borne ever further towards Cresce and neighboring Alderode, where ageing, widowed Leysa would be lighting the lamp above her door. Six years. Not so long. Maybe some crow’s feet around her eyes. Maybe a touch more grey in that butter-yellow hair. Frown lines. He wondered how often she smiled.

As the stars shone ever brighter and the distant susurrus of the river bore him off to sleep, he watched the fire and thought of her, sifting for good memories in all the tragedy. That mind quick and bright, nimbly managing the tempers of her household – once over dinner he and his mother-in-law had gotten into a somewhat heated political discussion and she’d defused it by briskly emptying a half-full pot of tepid water on his head, oh how they’d laughed. If the silver reached its destination then she would be in danger too, and he tried to convince himself that was the point of this reminiscence – reminding himself of what needed to be protected – but even as he drifted off he knew the true reason. Nostalgia. He was meditating over ashes.

“Ssael,” he said, barely coherent. “Have pity on this sad hypocrite.”

And in the dancing flames, he looked for Leysa’s silhouette.

*             *             *

Strange days in Kasslyne. On top was the story everyone had heard before: the rising sun, the dinner bell, the pinched purses, the families at war, the blood-spattered alleys, the flies over scorched farmland, the expectant young mothers with their bellies full of meat. All of it a great wrinkly skin stretched dry and taut, but underneath something wild seethed. That skin had been splitting, lately, and what oozed out was turning its patterns into something altogether new.

Somewhere in Ulestry a sleeping child cringed as though they’d been burnt and rolled over in bed with hands over their ears. In muddy New Tawhoque a tree branch scraping over a window sounded briefly like a snarled Continental curse. On the edge of the river Jarla, where a motionless Duane sat hunched over a fire with his shackled hands on his knees, the flickering shadows at the edge of the woods coalesced and stalked predatory. The air was full of something slurred. Bad dreams turned vapor. Implications of teeth.

See now, under that skin, down in the khert where color couldn't decide how it looked and the footpaths were made of stars one moment and millipedes the next. Where the air had no taste no matter how you gulped it and a shouted word would return to your ears sounding like a bell beneath deep water. Stalagmites of slithering iridescence were festooned with waxy creatures that laughed through their eye sockets and whimsically grew new heads. In Kasslyne above, old stories were told, but then they dripped down here and ran together in whorls, so that nothing was sure what to be.

See the grey man on these indecisive trails. Through this babbling amalgamation he stalked, eyes hollow, chin slicked with drool, the roof of his mouth still throbbing from where that weeping, raving crow-woman had shoved her bladed breast into his gob and rutted until it felt like the spike would split his head vertical. See Murkoph, skin knit back together, scars all in place, one long incisor chewing absently through his lower lip. Less a man than a roving indignity, a bit of sick that the world was hesitant to gulp back down and digest.

He entered the memory of a housefire, where the crackling red flame had already reached the family trapped inside – a portly trio, father holding wife and daughter close to his chest. In choir they screamed as the heat crisped them brown. Murkoph’s nostrils flared and at the very edge of things he could smell it, that salt-pork perfume, but like everything else here the sensation was maddeningly muted, everything little more than a photograph of itself, the flesh all hoarded topside. And he wasn’t interested, anyway. For once, he wasn’t hungry.

He passed through the back door of the burning house and into an endless field of red grass that cried for mercy when he stepped on it, and he thought to himself that he was still terribly cross with that titty-bird. Not only had her violations been most unwelcome, but her impugnation of his character was uncalled for. She'd accused him of hunger, that mindless aching need, and yet when her beak had split open he’d seen the same hunger in those leaking eyes, just for something more abstract than meat. And after that ravening bitch-goddess had pinned him and nursed him and flown back off into the sweating, putrescent sky, he’d been left with a headache and a belly like a tight iron ball. With the hunger held at bay, that awful itch in his teeth quieted, he’d been left with his thoughts. And they made for poor company.

The field suddenly cracked open beneath his feet and in ten seconds he fell ten thousand miles through a wet and mossy dark, onto a ruined battlement that broke his spine like a biscuit. He grumbled under his breath and walked off again, his body shaking tarantellasmic as the shattered bones rejoined beneath his skin.

He’d entertained himself for a time by regaling the phantoms with tales from his own memories, but even those were becoming stale. He’d so often flipped through these old pages - stories full of flashing knives, dripping feasts, and lusty lasses pulled whole and gasping into the mouth of the evening - that their edges would come apart in his hands if he did it much longer. And he couldn’t find a page with Ilganyag at all, despite her insistence that they were acquainted. This didn’t trouble him, merry mad Murkoph was trouble's cause and not its customer, but it did give him pause.

He lurched through a jelly-thick fog where the ground underfoot shook from the strides of something unseen and so big that the vibrations from its moaning alone broke fresh fractures in his ribs. He wouldn’t have forgotten a thing like Ilganyag. And come to think of it, even his own memories seemed to have that once-removed feeling of all the sensations down here in the khert, the vague impression that they’d happened to someone else.

He felt apart from himself, sometimes. Murkoph the rascal, blood-slicked up to the elbows, jabbering away about everything and nothing at all, but sometimes he felt like he was standing a bit aways from that fellow and watching him, thinking, by Yerta’s pendulous bosoms, Murkoph, is this you? This shambling, self-aggrandizing farce? This boorish lump of stitched-up rot, wagging its chin like an unstrung puppet? And then he’d turn on such thoughts, catch them between his jaws and snap them in half, but it was true, his own past was becoming a bit murky. Murkoph off in the murk, ha ha. If asked he’d happily confess to the willing and eloquent authorship of ten thousand atrocities, but after he’d spent so long lashed to that wall, marinating in atrocity up to the neck, he’d started to wonder how many of the signatures could really be his.

As soon as he got skinside he’d have to make a hot red line straight for that tailed girl and her godly green guardian. Thank her properly for digging him out of that cave and then leaving him to the thorny crow’s tender mercies. Sette Frummagem stuck at him like a pip in the hollow of a tooth. Magic digging hands aside, the khert bent in weird ways around her, like reeds in a gale, and she had skin soft and pale as peaches but when he’d tried a nibble she’d tasted like a week-dead sewer rat. He’d need to sample her again. Toes and tail and ears and eyes and Murkoph, is this you? Is this you? Is it, really?

“Sod off,” he snapped. “I got concerns enough without the internal dialogue.”

He was in a cavern that became a closet with a doorhandle that felt like something once living. When he pushed it open he found himself on a blackened beach, sand glimmering like glass. There were no waves, no moon, no stars. Across the water's surface chemical-colored patterns swirled like oil. He scented the air. No salt. No meat. Here in the khert was everything and nothing at all.

Ilganyag would return, he was certain. She’d just left him a little time to mull over her lofty gibberish, let the hunger creep back in and provide motivation. He’d straddle her throat, burst up through the flesh of this world and raise so many manners of hell that there wouldn’t be books enough to tell them all. He’d drown those faded, ambiguous days in the coppery blood of ones to come.

But for now he remembered women. Ones with soft and proper titties and eyes full of anticipation and fear. Each one a sealed letter full of sensation, scents and skins beyond reckoning. And as he stepped forward just enough so that his toes were immersed in the deathly still and too-warm waters of the khert’s false sea, he wondered if he could trace back all those memories of women, tear through them like the Frummagem girl’s mitts tore his cage of memory easy as mud. All the women he’d seen – Ilganyag, and that chestnut-skinned lovely who’d knocked him back into the khert when it had split open like a rotted fruit, and Adelier’s pious bore of a wife, and the ghost of that hammering sweat-soaked Plat that Quigley so fancied, all of these and a hundred more – pull them open, cast them aside, and at the core he’d find the first one, the woman who recognized who he had truly been, and in her recognition he would remember himself for good, he would know and be known, just before he opened his mouth wide and bit down harder than he or any starving man ever had before.

*             *             *

But you’re not there, thought Quigley.

But you’re not there, thought Duane.

But you’re not there, thought Murkoph.

And the coals grew cold in the light of dawn.


End file.
